Life update

Well, my holiday is over. I spent most of it on my newest hobby, Diablo 3, managing to push to 380^th place in the world for the class I play. I know some people might say why would you care about what rank you get for a video game? Well why does anyone care about being good at anything? Why should we care about if a football team wins a match more than the rank someone gets in an e-sport? Both have zero effect on our actual life.

In any case, I didn’t spend all my time on Diablo 3. I recently decided to teach my wife English. I’d hesitated before, mostly because of the cliché of language exchanges between foreigners and Chinese. It’s not such a cliché as I know a few couples that started out as a language exchange and ended up married but so far I’d resisted actually teaching my wife.

Of course, I correct her English in our day to day life but I have avoided sitting down and teaching her actual classes as I wasn’t sure what effect it would have on our relationship. However, I have finally decided, with her agreement, that she would benefit from having English lessons. I decided that despite the fact that it is me teaching my wife, I would do the class as if I was teaching someone paying me 500 yuan (70 dollars) an hour, which would be the going rate if I were tutoring someone else.

The first thing I did was make a needs analysis spreadsheet. We then went over it together to see what areas of English she wanted to focus on. We also decided that she would work towards passing the IELTS with a good score so her actual classes would be a mix of grammar review and IELTS training. I spent a morning planning her curriculum and first lesson and preparing the materials. The second lesson only took a bit over an hour to plan. In the end, I am hoping to have a twenty class course focusing on grammar review and IELTS preparation which I can then use for future students, if the occasion arises.

I also spent an hour each morning working on my Chinese. I’ve decided to try to pass the HSK level three, hopefully before the end of the year so I’m working on that as well. Now that we’ve settled in to our new apartment, we’ll probably have a house warming party towards the end of the month. The hard part for me is trying to figure out where to fit time in to work on my writing but I am hoping to start that up on Tuesday and Thursday evenings after this week. Despite not having time to write, I have been giving thought to the story for my newest novel and the direction it will go so hopefully when I do sit down to write it will flow smoothly. Once I get everything settled down, I will start looking into Master programs. That should fill up any free time I have quite nicely.